A $1 authorized charge would work for a little bit of "real person here" verification, but I'd imagine the $2 is to discourage auto-filling an entire town's worth of people via a script; all you'd need is, say, a voter registration list to get the necessary info of name and address.
They could confirm the address you are requesting with the billing address on the card.
This is what the '$1 authorized charge' is for when you submit the address change/mail forwarding request.
Re:How to stop junk mail
by hamburglar on Saturday June 04, 2022 @08:57PM
(#31626826)
I get shit loads of junk mail at my second address, which is not the billing address for my credit cards. They have to have a way to deal with that too.
I feel like that must be relatively new. I swear I used that site and I'm pretty sure I didn't have to pay a fee.
I bet they added it to discourage people from going through with the process.